SOLYS New Features

Getting a full picture of your potential inventory situation is now even easier with the introduction of the Future Logistics Opportunities (FLO) Report in SOLYS. This new report in SOLYS allows you to combine sales, forecast, and order data into a single report to help you identify any supply gaps, forecast issues, or other problems with the inventory flow from the warehouse to the store. This new report is designed to allow a high level of flexibility and customization, allowing you to create reporting that works for your business or category.

The Future Logistics Overview Report combines sales and inventory data, both vendor- and retailer-originated forecasts, and order data into one easy to use report. Using this report, you are able to see how past sales, forecasting, and ordering trends affected your sales and inventory levels at the store. You are also able to use the report to look forward and compare your forecasted sales with actual orders to predict future inventory shortages and recommend orders to fill any gaps.

While not required to run the report, Purchase Order Data unlocks the full potential of the report, allowing you to fully integrate all of your data and maximize the value you receive from the report. If you are interested in learning about adding Purchase Order data to your SOLYS product, please contact your Account Manager or Director of National Accounts.

If you are interested in learning more about this report and how you can use it to transform your inventory management process, click here.

Are you looking to uncover store insights, but are not sure where to start? Our five new canned Store Level reports are designed to make store level analysis simple and easy to understand. Each of the new reports addresses a specific business problem that can be isolated by leveraging the expanded data sets made available by having SOLYS store level information. We recommend using these reports on a weekly basis to gain a better understanding of how your business is performing at a more granular level.

Low Inventory Stores

The Low Inventory Stores report provides a quick and simple way to view your current inventory situation and offers easy, up-to-date guidance on inventory levels at both the store and distribution center level. This report will facilitate your discovery of stores that are out of stock but have available inventory at their servicing Distribution Center. This will enable you to recommend inventory pushes to your retailer to immediately resolve inventory problems. The report will also highlight issues at the DC level as those too may be out of stock and that may be why your stores are experiencing inventory issues. We highly recommend that you incorporate this report into your out of stock problem analysis process.

Click here to learn more about this report and read a sample business scenario highlighting how the report can be used.

Markdown Goal EOH

The Markdown Goal Ending On Hand (EOH) report delivers a straightforward and expedient way to evaluate your current inventory situation and project inventory sell-through before a product is put on markdown and clearanced out. Utilizing this report, you can optimize your inventory flow to minimize the amount of product on-hand at the end of product’s promotion cycle and minimize costly markdowns. We recommend integrating this report into your assortment management process and monitoring it towards the end of an assortment’s lifecycle.

Click here to learn more about this report and read a sample business scenario highlighting how the report can be used.

Sales to Inventory Distribution

Using the Sales to Inventory Distribution report, you can compare the share of sales and inventory across different groups of stores using a pre-defined store set. This can help verify that you have an even distribution of your product that is in proportional to the sales. With this information in hand, you can focus on meeting your in-stock and out-of-stock goals while ensuring that product is available where it is selling the most.

Click here to learn more about this report and read a sample business scenario highlighting how the report can be used.

MSC Comparison

The MSC Comparison report lets you build a custom report that cross-references two MSCs (Store Sets) using the metric of your choice. The report compares your selected metric between your MSCs and will provide you with quick visibility to any correlation that may exist. You can utilize this report for many different tasks, from deep inventory analysis to Category demographic trend reporting.

Click here to learn more about this report and read a sample business scenario highlighting how the report can be used.

MSC Store Alignment

To support our other MSC (Store Set) reports, we have created the MSC Store Alignment report, which can be used to verify that you have categorized your stores appropriately. This report provides you with a comprehensive list of the individual stores within each MSC (Store Group) based on your MSCs (Store Set) selection. Using this list, you can quickly ensure that your store classification is accurate and complete.

Click here to learn more about this report and read a sample business scenario highlighting how the report can be used.

Target Automated Data Download (TADD) enhances and extends the capabilities of LumiData’s POS data acquisition software tier, which is now available as an integrated Managed Services offering to all Target suppliers.

TADD is LumiData’s proprietary capability for automating a broad range of supplier needs to acquire multiple segmented layers and various aggregations of POS data from Target – and other retailers as well. Thus, for Target suppliers, TADD overcomes the current issues of using Merch IQ and BPD by offering the following major product functions and features:

Advanced POS Validation – offers built-in intelligence to avoid latency and correct mistakes, such as:Flagging and identifying inconsistent week-over-week or any other period-over-period data variations; giving alert notices automatically to users when Target’s POS data is inconsistent and disparate; auditing, reconciling, and performing accurate POS data restatement, and informing users what metrics are available in BPD and Merch IQ and when they are accessible.

MAJOR CUSTOMER BENEFITS

This new enhanced capability delivers “first-in-class” POS downloading from Target that will allow Target suppliers to realize the following major operational benefits:

LumiData’s Sales and Client Services representatives will discuss and review your various business and POS data needs and assist you with planning, implementing, training and supporting your decision to deploy and/or expand your use of TADD to meet your needs. Members of our account team will:

Assess your current POS data-level business needs and timeliness requirements

Recommend the proper use of TADD to address different sources and availability of POS metrics from Target

Help you map TADD POS data acquisition to meet the timely reporting needs of Target and internal management

Accepts sources of PO provided data from either the retailer and/or the supplier

Automatic data loading of POs into the standard SOLYS™ database

PO placement, analysis and management at the store and DC levels

Dynamic, user-controlled PO change management capability

Full suite of PO analysis and reporting features – standard, summary and ad-hoc

MAJOR CUSTOMER BENEFITS

With the announced availability of SOLYS™ Extended PO Analytics, users will now have the access and power to quickly address a variety of planning, managing and reporting needs and requirements on PO related operating issues.

SOLYS™ PO Analytics is specifically designed to manage the frequently occurring product flow challenges that routinely happen that can prove costly to both retailer and supplier. Now suppliers will be able to track, report, and control the current operational issues between POS consumption and PO placements, which can lead to suppliers being able to drive business and financial performance and improve operational and tactical performance.

This winter brings a wealth of enhancements to SOLYS that will have you well positioned to tackle the upcoming holiday season. This month's release focuses on Store Level Reporting improvements that will give you an edge in resolving inventory problems, understanding pricing variance and alerting you to issues before they become major problems.

Inventory Distribution GraphThe Inventory Distribution Graph provides insights into the overall distribution of your inventory across your retailer's entire chain leveraging store level inventory data. Armed with these insights you will be able to isolate problem stores and distribution centers to resolve inventory replenishment issues that may be obscured when looking at the total retailer's chain inventory measures.

Click here to learn more about the report and how you can leverage it to help mitigate your inventory misses.

Price Distribution GraphThe Price Distribution graph enables your team to visualize and track pricing variation across the retailer’s entire chain or a specific set of stores. By leveraging this information you will be able to monitor pricing problems that can arise due to comp-shop prices not reverting back to the original price or store level pricing overrides that are invalid. In addition to looking for pricing problems you can also utilize the graph to validate that the retailer is executing upon the agreed upon pricing strategy. Lastly the graph can also be used to gain a better understanding of how an item’s price varies in respect to its suggested retail price.

Click here for a quick tutorial on how to utilize this powerful new graph.

Store Execution Trend MetricsStore execution trend metrics are a new type of metric in SOLYS that can be used in analyzing, monitoring and resolving store execution problems. The metrics are divided up into three major categories:

Consecutive Week Metrics: These metrics track an ongoing trend at a store for a given item by counting the number of weeks that the event has occurred consecutively.

Stores with Metrics: These metrics track the number of stores with a particular problem and can be used in aggregate reports to see how many stores in your aggregation level have said problem.

Percent of Stores Metrics: These metrics track the percentage of stores in your current selected set that have a given condition.

Click here to review a list of all 12 new metrics and learn best practices on incorporating them into your weekly reports.

SOLYS Alerting Module OverviewDigging through millions of records per week to find problems at the store level seems like an insurmountable task that could take hours and hours of analysis. And you’re right, without the right tools you would be hard pressed to find phantom inventory issues, pricing problems and presentation minimum violations at individual stores. However, that changes today with the introduction of SOLYS Alerts. Our brand new alerting tool is designed to provide you with the information needed to mitigate the number of misses that occur regularly at individual stores throughout any retailer’s chain. We’ve started by providing you with ten basic alerts that we feel give you a great start on finding problem areas to look into. That’s not all though, our alerting tool was designed to make new alert thresholds or concepts easy to create and as such we encourage you to reach out to your Account Support Manager with any ideas you might have on alerts that aren’t covered in our initial set of ten alerts.

Clickhereto learn more about alerts and how to use them to reduce your inventory misses.